bid depth at 21.4 million, practically an ATH, and up from 21m (400k) ON THE WEEKEND!

bids creeping up to 20.8 million up 200k from this AM...

I am also SOOOOO f**king smart.  I spent my trading cash Monday @125 with a plan to sell Wed evening GMT (a few hrs ago). Remember the cardinal rule:  STICK to your strategy!  So I stuck to it...  

rpietila: PMed you...

if this trend holds, what's it gonna be like tomorrow when money actually hits the exchange!?!  (japan bank holiday today, and bids are holding pretty steady at just under 20M)

Yeah, but actually I think an actual put offer is a good reality check.

Because there's a BIG difference between saying NEVER and selling a put option for 100BTC for qty 250BTC!  And note the buyer holds all the counterparty risk.  To me the word NEVER would put the price at 1-5%.  Since there is no risk this cost is just to pay for the time, effort, and opportunity cost involved.

If he was serious he'd be offering a significant premium over gox... = to the opportunity cost of having goxcash during this LOOONG bank closed weekend. 

Imagining a black but is actually faced with a grizzly...  

Interesting choice... dumping just before the end of the longest bank holiday of the year.

Killing the coin?  LOL, Bitcoin was in the 10 range in December.  5 months later its around 100 and you think a bit of volatility will kill the coin?  Perspective.

It'll take new players longer to get set up (2 weeks to over a month).  But existing players may be inspired to prepare by buying capacity to move into BTCChina.  More importantly, even if net money flow is moving out of bitcoin, that's NET.  If there's one day the money flow will temporarily reverse, tomorrow is that day.  The only issue is we've sort of already rallied (from 80) up to where we should be tomorrow...

Well, the oscillations (gravy train) are essentially over on the mother-of-all-triangles.  We are entering the pinch point.  The next few days will be interesting.

In all metrics you could go either way:

On the one hand we have 17M on the bid side which is over double what we had originally climbing into 100.  But the end of the bank holiday did not increase bids.  Of course, the pinch point is not a good time to place bids if you can just watch the charts so there could be secret rocket fuel on Gox.

On the news front we have very bullish news coming out of China, but medium term. But those directly involved will not be able to buy for quite some time.  And we seem to have news exhaustion in the western world -- what coverage there is is all about speculation or regulation.  But lots of bears posting here... implying that people who wanted out are out.

Fundamentally, the transactional uses for BTC that have existed since early/mid 2012 seem to remain strong (although I haven't heard updates from gambling sites, etc).  So the 2012 extrapolated exponential trendline (call it E0) seems very solid.  However, the question the market will resolve in the next week is whether the E1 trendline (starting Jan 2013) is also solid (leaving E2 and E3 as the bubble exponentials).  On the bull side, note the trendline started near the block reward halving event & adoption of BTC payment options by certain web sites (these events sequester/limit supply and remain in force).  On the bear side, that trendline is still freakin' insane :-), and anyway "final capitulation" event would likely plumb below it (we are right on it now).  Also on the bear side: rpietila thinks its a sure thing, and is basing his "I am THE new gentleman elite" posts on its continued performance.  

Your hopes seem ambitious in a flat but volatile market.  But BTC is on an exponential adoption -- the only debate is what exponential  .  It might not be your trading that does it but just underlying appreciation.  

So I recommend you run some spreadsheet projections.  Against a realistic estimate of your day trading:

How much you can save from your day job and put it into BTC?
How much would BTC have appreciated anyway?
Realize that you can still catch a LOT of the major price action with the opportunity to trade 2x per day (6am and 9pm say)?

I think you'll find actually earning money and investing it works out better for you.  Esp. when you realize that while day trading excess money is "fun", it SUCKS when it affects your ability to pay for food/rent.  

Also read the professionals (sunnakar, rpietella, Loaded) comments here carefully; they may gloat about trading, but their bread and butter is a variety of financial services -- essentially they find BTC for whales off-market and take a slice.  What do you think rpietella's "rock star" persona and summit is all about?  Rock star so noobs go to him with their $.  Summit is to build a "dealer network" -- in other words provide rpeitella enough depth so he can service the whales.

Thanks!  I suppose the tl;dr; takeaway from my post is that trading this situation is just gambling.  So instead use the little dips or rises to re-position yourself for moves in either direction.



Maybe some gamer hooked his frag count to his trading bot?  

  I resisted the ignore button till now but this post pushed me over.  Wasting my time to go to bitcoincharts looking for even tiny evidence of something...

timescale too short  you can find anything at that granularity

Background for our new members: adam had an awesome record of doing exactly the WRONG moves from about 5 to 15 USD.  If you don't believe me, just check the first 500 or so pages of the original wall movement thread 

What would cypherdoc say?

With all the speculators on this forum claiming to have sold out waiting for 50, it was pretty obvious we weren't going anywhere near there (barring a major news event that causes a fundamental price re-eval).  But the prevailing bearish sentiment is still pushing the price down.  But at the same time, China is still building demand and it looks like the USG has completed its roundup of non-compliant sites...

Soon we will be in a situation where the incumbent speculators are going to be fighting the newcomers for coins  .  

But is today's breakout the beginning?

Take a look at the volume for the past week and note the transition from sell-to-buy, starting right after the dump from 110:
http://www.bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

really?  Is your monitor upside down  

50 BTC moves the market 5 bucks :-)

Looks like bull and bear sentiment is diverging -- some whales REALLY think we're going up, some REALLY think we are going down.  I don't believe a single player is manipulating both sides -- too expensive

  over 40k coins changed hands.  That's $4 million bucks

big pause... everybody say WTF run off check press LOL

Hope all you newbie doomsayers got back in!    If not, well welcome to bitcoin and thanks for your coins.  Trading here requires a steady hand; its not for the faint of heart.  You can choose low volatility and inflation (USD), or high volatility and deflation (BTC) 

Hmm... I was more referring to the action of the past few weeks where these forums seemed so bearish even in the face of lots of positive developments.

its interesting to see this rally with significant volume on major price rises.  I don't think we've seen that so consistently since the run up to 266

I love to see these large purchases with this kind of slippage.  Is very likely that these coins are leaving a traders hands and moving into a medium to long term investors' -- someone who does not care about 1 to 3 percentage points.    Especially an early-week purchase -- funds hit the exchange, so buy the coins. 

Sure a trader could do this to try to spark a rally, but that's a VERY dangerous game; a lot more dangerous with a lot less upside then just buying at 65 to 75 and holding for a few days 


Something else to think about:

We dropped to 65 and then right back where we started at 100+.  Did ANY money leave Gox AT ALL?  Or was this all just long-term bull traders trying to outfox each other?

Interesting... if they had liquidity issues they would have agreed to the cancellation as that keeps the fiat at Gox.  Seems just like bad customer support.

Not bad WRT response time but bad in that the transfer probably WAS in the bank's queue and so to remove it at that point would have meant calling the bank.  Not something they want to do in this situation of a tenuous banking relationship.  But some kind of more informative response would have been better.

Everybody thinks SD buyout -> 150k BTC being sent to stockholders... not true if the buyer already owned 90% of the outstanding stock.  Always a good plan to ensure the purchasing "premium" is a lot fewer actual BTC than calculated.

As for the "whys" of the sale, it was inevitable.  When you've got little, being involved in a quasi-legal enterprise (that does not violate your own ethical standards) is one thing.  But once you're looking at living a luxurious lifestyle without ever working again, the idea of cooling your heels in jail over an issue that could have gone either way starts looking pretty grim.  SD probably went on the block the moment the website was blocked to US customers.  

Better (for SD at least) that it be sold to an owner living in a jurisdiction where gambling is legal...

And campbx was tracking gox not bitstamp which is abnormal.   A few days ago gox pulled up to 92, while cbx hit 90 but bitstamp below 85.  So I figured I could trade this by selling on cbx and letting it relax back down to bitstamp.  Didn't really work... bitstamp is rising now.  I got out (AKA back into BTC) with a buck per btc profit on very low volume... I was looking for 5.

The big dumps (w/o similar big buys) ARE a post dump phenomenon.  Someday they will stop.  And if you look to the past you'll see the price slowly rising in 2012 from 4.x to 13 before the big launch.  You don't want to miss 4.x to 13 that didn't suck one bit :-).  And personally I don't think it will rise even that slowly... in 2012 bitcoin was still "dead", now its just post bubble.  It already did that.  The only thing holding it down now is fear.  Lots of awesome but "building-a-base" news has come out last few weeks...

I think honestly that its even hard to entirely characterize what happened as a bubble when you have a price that doubled 5 times but stabilized at *only* 4 doublings.  Its something new & I think bitcoin behavior is going to be the subject of a key chapter in intro Econ textbooks 2025.  "bubble" is the closest term we've got today, but a better description would be over-eager investment in a technology that is world changing.  In 1999 the total market cap of all internet companies trying to do X routinely exceeded even the most optimistic projection of X by 10 to 100 times (there were 10-100 companies each valued as if it would gain the entire market share).  That's a bubble.

I've got no questions about what that wall (not pulled when touched so not fake) at 96 is doing.  Somebody wants coins for very long term investment.  He doesn't care if he gets them today or next month, so just places a likely wall and lets people sell into it.  A wall like this is a way to communicate to big sellers that a buyer is there.  Many here forget that if you look at the BTC graph over a relatively short 5 year time frame it is freaking incredible.  But its THAT graph that most investors (vs speculators daytraders, etc) care about.

Sorry for an on-topic posting  , but anyone track the 3000 GoxUSD bid wall that's on $100?  When was it put up, has it been touched, etc?

Also, anyone care to speculate on the CampBX/bitstamp inversion?  That is, normally CBX is closer to gox, but now bitstamp is closer.

I think that we are seeing the predominately North American "early" (anyone up 100% or more, say) adopters leaking some coins for summertime fun on campBX and CAvirtex because they can't get out on Gox.  This is pushing the prices down on these geographically limited exchanges.  At the same time buyers who do not have access to these exchanges (Asian) are buying from Gox.  The significant # of exchanges in China with quite high total volume strongly implies coins are shifting to this region via Gox.  Why not bitstamp?  I don't know.  Can Asian and non-euro European areas get easy access to bitstamp? 

Whales move slowly but have a longer memory.  They are bringing us up because they are probably completing their analyses started during the run-up and entering long term positions.  Fewer small buyers are discovering bitcoin due to the ebb of the hype cycle (at the same time the level of news coverage in this "ebb" seems significantly higher than in 2012...so it hasn't ebbed so much as de-hyped) and the effect of these small buyers is probably hidden by the incumbent sells and inflation.

  you should have been in 25-50% at the short stability at 65-70 b/c predictions on this forum were to 50, and it NEVER goes quite to the bottom.  Then the whales from 70-90 could have been a big hint with a nice long pause at 87-92 for you to finish your purchasing (say up to 95% -- always leave a little  ), esp. since we've been hanging 'round 90-110 for months.

Or maybe you're day-trading and you've been in and out (of Ms Market? ) a lot since then?

No joke... quit your day trading perspective and zoom yourself out to an investor's timeframe.  Despite a flash of media hype barely anybody knows about bitcoin.

As I said before I think that this not a bubble.  It is a new thing, perhaps driven by the speed worldwide subcultures can communicate due to internet technologies.  With most prior bubbles (that I know about), total valuations during the bubble reached many times the size of the conceivable future market.  Yet the bitcoin market cap topped out orders of magnitude below that (not going to repeat all the great infographics ppl have posted here).  In a system with exponentially increasing real value, for the first time knowledge can flash through subgroups FASTER then the exponential value rise.  At the same time, knowledge cannot easily pass across gender/age/vocation/language/cultural boundaries because to do so requires a re-working of the presentation, a different emphasis, or different layered applications.  We saw BTC flash through certain sectors of college students, libertarians, IT professionals, finance, etc.  We still see it predominantly used by young people...

The phenomenon of rapid, super-exponential spread through these subcultures is what has caused the BTC micro-bubbles of 2011 and 2013 -- periods when expectation simply temporarily exceeded the reality.  Essentially the bitcoin market cap DID vastly exceed the conceivable future market OF THOSE SUBCULTURES only.  But bitcoin is universally applicable... new memes are already coming: "bitcoin and PMs are complementary" for example.

Except that they've "popped" "down" to 5-10 times the pre-bubble price... this a very important difference.

anyone (else) remember when that was the only way to post to the alt.hackers news group??

Interesting... bitstamp and cbx rallying a couple percent while Gox flatter; stuck under 120 but no real wall until 125.  This is the opposite of the typical divergence where gox rallies and the others are flat.

May not matter; this move started on bitstamp & campbx (see quote below).  Makes sense... nobody in their right mind would send deposits to Gox to buy coin both due to the admitted delays in deposit AND the high premium.  But this is a key event in the breakaway of Gox as leader.

I think we may see cbx and bitstamp approach Gox -- as the other exchanges close the gap, more GoxUSD will buy BTC to get it out at a loss acceptable to each individual.  If cbx/bitstamp closes the gap entirely, it could get us to the strange situation where there is a LOT of buy orders on Gox, few BTC for sale, but no price movement.  In other words, Gox starts following cbx/bitstamp even though it has the largest order book.

Does it even matter?  Sellers on Gox are either arbing or med/long term bulls.  The real money has got to be entering and leaving through the other exchanges.  You'd be crazy to buy on Gox's 10-20% premium, and if you actually WANT your $ you've got to sell somewhere else.  

Keep your eye on bitstamp, campbx (reflects US sentiment) and ESPECIALLY btcchina.  What I see is quite a rally on strong volume this past week (and similar past few weeks).  Also looks to me like % volume shifts heavily to those exchanges during rallies.  When nothing is happening, Gox takes a higher % volume (but lower overall volume) -- this is just trader/bot churn.  But with the action hits, its on the other exchanges as you can see by the lower % volume on Gox.  

Look to the other exchanges for the action that is defining this market.

After a lull, I'm seeing a decisive breakout in price and volume above the 2nd bounce high of $13x around Jun 1.  News is generally positive.  Volume is strong in bitstamp.  In fact, volume in bitstamp was significantly > mt. Gox during the lull.  This is telling me that the small investor is buying.  Previously in this rising market, volume has been strong during breakouts...

Speed of the rise is not a concern.  This is bitcoin.  My only concern is btcnCNY volume is not high.  But the timing (its around midnight there) and preceding low volume days probably has caught most traders there off guard.  Look for a strong run up to bitstamp's price on btcnCNY 4-8 hours from now to confirm this market motion.

Its a very interesting question whether this Gox money has been there all the time or not.  On the one hand, Gox price is higher, so why would new $ come in? On the other hand, a long term whale buyer (who is probably buying through a broker) will easily swallow 5%+ because:
0. Slippage is bigger than that anyway.
1. Not needing to be verified on the other exchanges (the broker needs to buy NOW)
2. Did the broker even bother to mention that other exchanges are lower? :-)
3. The broker makes his cut regardless.
4. Even with the situation with USA, Gox probably remains most trusted with large $
5. Its a buy, not a sell.

  brilliant, after fees you make about $2.60 or 1.8% but open yourself to risk in a market that could be at 150 or 130 by then... the only trade that's worth those pennies is an arbitrage with no time risk.  Meanwhile walls placed above $120 buy ALL the coins.

... to get out you've got to sell somewhere else.  Where are the dumps?  Other exchanges are following not diverging.  During whale-less days, BitStamp is seeing steady or slowly rising prices with > volume than Gox.  If whales are selling slowly, we'd be seeing these exchanges fall.  Bid depth too small, so whales wouldn't sell ANYTHING?  That's silly...

Volume is low during downtrends, higher during uptrends.

Keep beating your drum, you might be able to buy your 5 coins back soon :-)

Whale MO:

Market can't take that and the risk is too high.  You'd start by cracking through a few ask walls (because you know your demand is going to push up the price so you might as well be the one that benefits) and then proceed by transferring a few million USD worth a week (descending as the market thins out) and buying on multiple exchanges simultaneously whenever reasonable ask walls start to build up.  You'd be willing to buy on exchanges that are 10-20% higher than others because you know your purchases alone will drive supply/demand curve enough so a 10% premium will be over taken in a week or 2, if that is where the liquidity is.

By transferring weekly, you never have too much value on the exchange and you eat the vertical portion of the ask curve, which gets you the most coins without driving the price much (you want to keep the price low for next week).  You'd buy BTC right away to minimize the time $ is on the exchange... so early in the week is likely.

If you have left over $ for the week -- that is, there weren't enough asks, you put up a wall maybe halfway back to entice big sellers to move BTC onto the exchange (its fine if they don't sell into your wall.  if its put up as an ask, you'll get it next week).  If you spent your weekly transfer, then no walls and no activity for a week -- to let the price drop down as far as it will go.  This is a better choice for a "whale" than putting up an ask wall b/c bitcoin is now officially $, the exchange knows who you are, and you have no interest in being prosecuted for market manipulation over maybe 5%.  And especially when it puts your hard-won BTC at risk of purchase by a surfacing whale.


Pump MO:

If you were "pumping", you are doing it differently; you want to maximize slippage. So you'd buy in much bigger gulps -- the further you push along the curve the further your dollar pushes up the BTC price.  Possibly even right after someone else's big buy (remember a bit of a loss in buys don't matter much -- if you are pumping you have a much bigger stash you are prepping to sell)  And you'd probably do it on one exchange only, relying on arb and trending bots to buy up the others.  Pumping like this would require a protective bid wall near your final price to psychologically cement in the new price.  You would never leave an ask wall half bought, there's no pump for your buck.  You'd put a bid wall up safely away from it and hope other eat into it while you transfer more $.  And when you did eat it, it would be the wall + the flat behind it...



hmm... which do you see last few weeks?

The simultaneous purchase of 1.6k on bitstamp makes me think that you are wrong...

The simultaneous 1.8k BTC buy on bitstamp is not consistent with the get-out-of-Gox theory...

hmm... all I had was the bitcoinity 3 hour charts to compare the times.  But it doesn't feel right as an arb to me... the price difference is so good right now anyway that if you could arb it, you wouldn't be waiting around with an ask to be filled on gox.  You'd be running your money around the loop as fast as possible.

Please remove the phone # and ignore these trolls.  You posted the name; that's pretty good.  And if ppl really care I like your idea of 1 person calling.  But last thing bitcoin needs a bunch of guys from these forums trolling the poor guy by phone!

I don't know "edccdn" could easily be "Ebay Deals Co, Content Delivery Network".  Registered godaddy, located in usa.

And on the site, we also have:
http://edccdn.com/tabletdebate/
http://www.edccdn.com/thanksgiving/gt/gourmetthanksgiving.html
http://www.edccdn.com/craftyholiday/

Its just too eclectic -- just like it would be if it was a dumping ground for media associated with a blog.  But of course this is just a blog -- it is implicitly the opinion of the blog author and not really representative.  So I don't think its fake (in the sense that it won't get anyone fired at ebay deals) I just think its probably just a semi-internal drop-box type site.  And best case, it just says that a few people in a very large company are interested in bitcoin.

Anyway, I'd join a conf call with this guy, but we should come up with some reasonable questions... Obviously he's not going to know (or if he did would not tell us) ebay/paypal's complete bitcoin rollout strategy and timeline. :-)  But at the same time, maybe I'm not the right guy b/c its not like I am running a bitcoin startup or something...

If the price goes down its a clear H&S, TA wins awesome predictive power.   If it breaks up its was clearly not H&S, it was a retracement.

Its interesting to see the situation on Gox.  Over the weekend sellers simply did not fill in the ask; it still had the knife-like look of a fast sell-off.  And you've got to ask yourself why would anyone put up an ask?  Since its very difficult to take $ out of gox, the majority of the sellers are traders.  A good chunk of them may have bought above today's price so are less likely to sell now...

TL;DR The whales won't find significant volume on Gox until they eat into new rally territory.

You don't understand. This is massively bullish... only way BTC volumes could be that low is if the price was extremely high! 

That's my guess; the whale(s) are buying about a million $ a week.  That's probably all that they trust on Gox at one time.  The pullback on Gox is pretty natural after the kind of runup we've seen, OR maybe it is just that arbitrage is finally happening.  This whale put up that wall at 135 because that was his average buy in price.  He put it near the money.  HE WANTED it to be eaten.  He WANTS coins. 

The whale is NOT supporting the price during the week.  He is happy to disappear for a week and hope the price goes down.  This is the behavior of a real long term investor...

Right now, I think it is very risky to sell.  But at the same time, there's lots of coins being mined and in theory these ASIC owners need to sell to recoup their investment.  There may be a large hidden ask at this price and this whale is only eating half the generated coins per week... but of course there are a lot of smaller investors adding demand.

You're probably right although it would depend on the ask curve at that time but it doesn't really matter.  I didn't bother to actually calculate it.  Point is that buy wall was right near where the trades happen.  You think that 134 or 133 would get hit, but the whale or more likely the whale's investment adviser must have thought that that was too low.  This person is likely getting a commission -- so its more important to him to acquire the coins than it is to save < 1% on the purchase.

It'll be interesting to see how long this purchasing strategy lasts...

Market's often very thin... and when it crashes it goes down amazingly fast.  What happens if Gox can't meet your stop loss?  Better to not offer the feature than to get sued over it.

LOL, can someone recommend an equivalent multi-exchange summary site esp. with Chinese exchanges?  Preferably not one owned by any exchange...

no reason other than what others have said on this forum... not really worth the time to investigate it.  Actually, it also has issues on my mobile firefox browser so I'm ready to change anyway.  It's script somehow stores up all the updates and then when I pop back to the page the rows blink yellow rapidly, unspooling all the page updates.  Obviously that's a bug that could be fixed (might even be in firefox but I don't see it on any other page) but also for mobile I'd rather it was not using bandwidth spooling all the page updates when the browser is hidden.

I thought the buy on monday looked a little light.  

He should have waited.  
I was reading your nervous twitching becoming fear.
Instead, jumpy whale clearly fears competition.

Seriously man, go make graphics, wait tables, mow lawns or something and use it to buy coins.  You'll do a lot better than trading 1.38 BTC...

Let's say you can make $10 an hour which is certainly on the low side for someone tech savvy.  Let's say you put in 2 hrs a night and 8 on the weekend instead of hanging out here and eyeballing bitcoinity.  So that's $100 or .71 BTC a week.  Do you really think you can make a 51% return in BTC (.71/1.38) per week trading?

Sure the equation may change once you have 10 or even 100 BTC... but trading it is very risky whereas earning and buying is not (in terms of amount of BTC amassed).  

If you haven't reached your BTC investment goal, then if there is ANY time in your entire life where it makes sense to work weekends or skip expensive friday night bar hopping then that time is now.

this thread becomes useless when you guys start posting fake charts whales breaching when there is zero volume etc.  Please go outside and enjoy life. things will get exciting again soon...

When too many people expect something and can profit through an action that dampens the effect, you can be pretty sure it won't happen.

without whale activity either... could get very interesting if a whale or 2 fears missing the boat.

I wonder if the volume this past week reflects actual economic activity, rather then trading/speculation.  The market is neither too high or two low to encourage trading... and Gox problems discourage arb.  No big whale positions being taken.  What's left except actual economic activity?

First off, don't post the question on these forums  .  

But seriously, that's not a huge amount -- ~500 to 2k coins at today's prices.  The key questions here are:
What's your starting point? (are you verified on any exchanges)
What's your timeframe?
Is this potentially a repeat thing?
Are you interesting in cultivating new exchanges?

The best short-term strategy that does not involve manipulation would be to purchase on multiple exchanges simultaneously.  You could probably fill that order on bitstamp, btc-e, campbx and only drive the price up a buck or two.  By using multiple exchanges and buying as soon as the money hits your accounts you minimize exchange risk.  But that presupposes you have accounts in these places.

If you had only one account (at bitstamp, say) and a longer timeframe, I'd break the purchase into 3-4 smaller wires to minimize exchange risk.  That would also space the purchases out so you'd likely not move the market.

But if you anticipate repeat business (and judging by your website, I'd guess you do), I'd register and KYC with every exchange I could find, including one in China.  Because you never know when an exchange could disappear... and if you are filling whale orders you may need to produce on a short timeframe.

Finally, you might want to create a relationship with one of the new exchanges that have been recently announced and risk a few $ filling out their bid orderbook.  I'll bet a phone call could get you really low fees...

we've got an exponential rise "bubble" in mining hash rate forming http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate.  So blocks are being produced too often, every 7 minutes on average instead of every 10.  This is causing extra coins to to be minted and presumably some of those enter the marketplace.  Yet the price is flat or trending upwards.  So maybe 30% more coins then normal are being eaten by this "dead" market.  I haven't bothered to quantitatively calculate it. 

So what's gonna happen when the bubble "pops" and hash rate flatlines or even descends? 

OMG I actually briefly unignored Walsoraj because he posted right after mine... stupid stupid stupid how can I get these seconds of my life back?  

PS: I just slipped/pushed Gox 135.25 to 136.00 75 cents to buy 5 measly coins!  That's got to be a slippage record but I've finally gotten clean of that disaster  I'm thinking of b&h and going BTC information blackout for a few months, we'll see if I can resist :-)

Its just one data point but the amount of BTC seized (26,000 by one media outlet) tells us how much SR was affecting the supply of coin.  In other words, not much.  And this coin may be tied up as evidence for quite some time so its confiscation is not about to affect supply.

However, I would imagine that the SR economy formed a group of people willing to buy and sell at the current price whatever that might be (I'm assuming the drug price is in USD and constantly repriced in BTC, and of course that addicts need for a fix is fairly price insensitive -- but I don't actually know having never been to SR).  So some liquidity may leave the system.

Watch cbx it actually led yesterday, moving up to 127 with a large bidwall (normally it is near bitstamp).  Even though it has low volume, I think its a barometer of USA sentiment.

And a blast from the past for all you "traders" that have just realized that China is important...

past performance is no guarantee of future results... stop living in the past

Can you read?  EVERY and I mean EVERY intro to bitcoin article mentions that they are hard to actually buy...

Intl airports would be a good place for these if the exchange fees could be lower than fiat-fiat exchange rates...

Don't rename we're at 1700+ pages and need a restart.  Maybe wait till 2000 but right now works for me.  Adam?

funny, I just wrote a rambling projection on how international B2B is the next killer app for bitcoin (now that China is ramping up). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=311495.msg3351398#msg3351398

Even a year ago it was difficult to receive international wires b/c there is a different USA-only wire system.  Credit unions and regional banks do not get a SWIFT number...  I had to actually GO to a physical room inconveniently located an entire 5 minute drive from my house, fill out forms ON PAPER, and actually TALK DIRECTLY to another living breathing smiling human being to open an account that would accept international wires. :-)  But seriously -- the real issue is that it had to be with one of the big names whose business model is to basically drain your funds with fees, etc.  For example, if I don't do at least 1 txn a month in the account there is a fee.

Joking aside, bitcoin is awesome at medium international xfer. Small can be done with paypal, large with a wire.  The sweet spot IMO is 500-5000 USD.

OK YMMV...I didn't make a study out of it.  But I gather all banks have an ABA number (domestic) but that is not a SWIFT (international) number.  I did get turned away from a couple of smaller CUs and banks so finally I sucked it up and went with BAC.  I was getting paid by a major European luxury automobile company for work on their prototype cars so it was not an issue of ignorance on their end.  In fact, about 6 months later they opened a US bank account and notified me that wires could now be domestic (and I'm 100% positive they did not do that just for my business!!! :-).

Yes but at the same time, a high constant fee is a good way to lock "most" people out but keep it legal for you and your pals (provided you are rich or funded by the rich).  

For example, from reading these forums I learned the term "dollar denominated account" a few months ago.  So I googled around found just one bank (UBS) that offered foreign currency denominated accounts.  I thought it might be a good idea to diversify a bit into euros, yuan, etc.  Called them up -- not going to happen unless I was going to deposit > 1 million USD.  Too much overhead and paperwork...

Ironically, there's a trick that lets you do it in a small way with the company we love-to-hate: Paypal.  If someone sends you money you can choose to hold it in the currency it was sent...

Great! Thx I should have asked you guys a long time ago...

As evil as high inflation is, it is not an unexpected event given past history in any fiat currency that has a history.  But a tax on assets breaks the whole concept of private property.

I haven't read the report yet (I plan to) but from the quotes it seems like the report is entirely forgetting the most important thing which is that the feedback loop that rewards success and punishes failure must be preserved.

This was my issue with Cyprus bank bail-ins vs. bankruptcy.  It is not sufficiently disruptive to cause people (or their intellectual successors -- in other words a whole culture) to be fired.  Let's compare the Cyprus disaster with Detroit bankruptcy.  In Detroit we have:

www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57606936/kwame-kilpatrick-former-detroit-mayor-sentenced-to-28-years-in-prison-for-corruption/

"...the sweeping federal probe that has led to the convictions of more than 30 people."

A government "default" (or perhaps better stated as "repealing unfunded entitlement promises") and/or high inflation (which points directly at the government) will cause a shift to fiscal responsibility, if anything will.  I think we as a society need to learn an important lesson which is essentially that NO promise or fund is safe from subsequent politicians if there is any legal way it can be accessed.  Programs like social security, teacher's retirement funds, etc need to be legally and administratively separate (and even that may not be enough, but at least it is worth a try).  And all Ponzi systems -- that is, any unfunded promise that expects to be funded by future labor or taxes -- should be not legally binding.

90 not so much esp. on gox but 165 to 175 could be a buyer hoping for a dump.  but if s/he sees momentum building this b8d could become a mkt order...

so sorry 4 u.  gox is not btc.  usa is not btc.  broaden your horizons and take adv. of any dip you see.

Good luck with that.  Maybe you'll be able to catch the dip around CNY 1500... 

Why buy a laptop? Because if you wait a year it would be a lot more powerful, touchscreen, better camera etc for cheaper.  There comes a time when people need to buy stuff almost regardless of future price performance.  And of course some people are always thinking we are near the top.  And also the price isn't going to keep rising like this forever.  It'll flatten out eventually and at that time exchange of BTC we become more common.

But what you've mentioned is the achilles heel of a "sound" currency.  It is theorized that during recessions/depressions people tend to hoard it, spending as little as possible -- saving it in case the recession continues.  This creates a negative feedback of reduced consumption -> fewer jobs -> more reduced consumption.  But on the other hand, in this highly populous, resource limited world careful consumption might be better in the long run than triggering growth that is not connected to greater underlying resource efficiency.

This is not surprising, as its essentially ATH resistance.  $23x was the highest plateau -- the move to 266 and back down was an intra-day jag with little volume or trading time opportunity.  It was the 230s where lots of ppl bought in.   I think once we break into the 240s we'll move past the ATH without out much volatility.

Just eyeballing it, there's about 7 million dollars worth of coins for sale on ALL the major exchanges.  Things could get pretty crazy really quick... hopefully buyers will hold back waiting for the chimeric "dump" and we'll see not-entirely-irrational price appreciation.

be calm... up $20+ in one day was too much excitement... a pullback is a good thing at this point.

guess he met his buying target...

Ahh NOOOOOOO!! You SOLD your trading stash didn't you!!!! We are going to be subjected to another 3 months of bearish comments... kill me now  

Somehow my intuition tells me these coins are either going to be hoarded by casual purchasers that want a bitcoin position but don't want to go through the hassle of exchange verification, or spent right away.  But they won't be SOLD for fiat on an exchange by the purchaser.

Either situation is bullish for bitcoin...

No man, her best decision was buying BTC, YOURS was marrying her!  

Really, I feel like we went from 5 to 266 in bubble #2.  5 was a long period of stability... in April 202 so that actually x50.  The only real pullback between then and the top was the pirate disaster, and that is easily seen as artificial.  That is, its a external event that could have been triggered anytime -- not really related to the trend.

I see it as a singularity actually -- perhaps not in the physics sense but as a singular event.  Ignoring the momentary drops into the 50s and 60s, an investment when it was priced USD 5-10  (or .05 to 1 for the even earlier adopters) is worth 25 - 50x the investment after.  For anyone who made a non-trivial investment, it will be the largest share of their holdings no matter how much fiat is put in now.

Same thing now.  For anyone who bought in the flat around $100 or buys up to about 500 -- that's going to be their main holdings when we hit 1000, 5 or 10k.


WRT moving up so fast, it really IS different this time.  The engine is firing on more cylinders -- USA, Europe, Asia.  I feel that the last "bubble" was mostly driven by USA.  Of course Europe was a major player but rallies occurred during USA day time (mostly).  In contrast this 65+ rally seemed to be USA, 130+ rally was pulled by Asia, but now the Second Market fund, Canada ATM news, etc is also driving the exchanges up 24 hrs a day.  Note how major psychological barriers are just blown through -- for every barrier 1500, 2000 CNY, 200,250,300USD, 200EU, there are 2 other currencies where that level is irrelevant.

Africa, India, and much of South America are still missing.  They will be instrumental for the next one...

The question is, "will this difference translate into a sustainable rally at these rates?"  I think the answer is that it will be sustainable at higher rates, but of course in the end there will be a blow-off.  There always is.  Personally, I'm hoping for a daily-pullback today, I think we need one...

But think on this: Has there EVER been something that hit its exponential adoption curve simultaneously worldwide before?



 

Gox + Stamps + BTC-china  = about 13k coins...

ATH HAT TRICK!!!! (all 3 exchanges hitting simultaneously)

Ok, so I wasted 5 min to get an ATH HAT TRICK screen cap!!! 

ATH on gox and near it on bitstamp... we seem to have recovered from the dump extremely quickly.  I think that the DDOS trick may no longer be effective... and its existence on btc-china implies that the pullback was artificial (although MUCH needed, so thanks!).  Some manipulator is likely looking at a painful loss 

yes but by the time you've run your money around the block and earned 5%, Bitcoin has appreciated by 20% (or 100%).  That is, your money spends 99% of its time in fiat form but Bitcoin is appreciating exponentially.  

Nobody puts 100% in BTC so why not arb with the money you hold in fiat, you ask?  

The problem is that the risk profile is not the same as your other fiat investments.  Its likely more on a level with BTC itself because if the exchange crashes they'll likely take ALL your money not just the BTC.  And the exchanges are not insured, in a foreign country, etc.  Its like having USD on bitfinex... do you really think that if bitfinex gets cracked and loses ALL its BTC they'll return your USD before declaring bankruptcy?

But sure some people are arbing which is why the prices are somewhat aligned... and that's how BTC flows to China...

A demonstration that Bitcoin is a Hydra, or to refer to a book that is mostly rehashing ideas well-known since the Ancient Greeks, it is "Anti-fragile"...  

keep the drive.  There's a big difference between "unreadable" by some temp college kid who just runs a program that reads the disk and repairs the FAT and unreadable when doing so would be worth $50M (for example).

always have multiple avenues into and out of this market...

good move.  I admit its really tempting to trade these rises and dumps on gox but also dangerous...

WTF?!  Bitcoinity cracks me up!! 

US and Europe want to go down but China says NO! 

triple play 

These people seem to be addressing the situation honestly and in the larger context of advancing technology.  American govt may have issues but also is clearly one of the best of the bunch.  Love the ref to how USA is proud of advancing tech and knows it has a significant impact on economy.  Contrast this to Thailand.

Hope someone points out that a lot of credit card fraud (by stealing # held in databases, etc) would disappear with bitcoin.

  LOL, I know everyone says that I think a lot more than they actually laugh out loud.  But for this one I really did!

"hear frustration"?  LOL, it is a prepared statement.  I didn't hear a single word of frustration from LE.

sorry about the OT (LOL) but what are the popular few Chinese language forums? (accessible from mainland China)

last question answer should have been that dollars can't magically refuse to change hands -- and forcing this to occur at the monetary level creates tons of issues for legit users as you can see (for example) by all the "paypal sux" stories.  So best thing is to manage it at the business level

He may be crazy (i.e. not adhering to normal societal norms) but that does not mean he is not right!  In fact, I think rpietila should buy out the asks on a tiny exchange and then sell himself a tiny fraction to make it spike!  Epic counter-troll to the forum trolls :-)

But ignoring the specific value of 300 per mBTC, there is a feeling which he seems to have gotten correct (and other uberbulls, of course).  And that is that Bitcoin IS in a singularity period.  What I mean by that is nothing you do post Dec 31 will have much of an effect (on your portfolio) as the decisions you made pre Jan 1.

weekend doldrums.  We've actually done really well for a weekend why all the shakiness?

From my point of view China reversed Monday's correction with a few large buys at dawn.  I think they remain very relevant.  

As you observed we are well above the long term exponential trend.  The US and Europe were doing just fine supporting that trend for the last 4 years.  Second market and other bullish news do not imply that US and Europe are ready to break away from the trend -- although an exponential trend is so hard to maintain we must expect a break away eventually.

Now the world's second largest economy (and fastest growing) is suddenly having their first bitcoin bubble.  It is quite possible that this increased adoption has increased the "slope" of the long term exponential trend and will continue to do so for an extended period.

A look at the dynamics of the markets in the past 2 months clearly shows them providing support for each other, causing corrections to not be nearly as deep.

only reason I've heard of is that it can be used to anonymize your bitcoins.  Sell btc for litecoin, buy back later.  While bitcoin provides compelling reasons (beyond paypal and CC) for vendor adoption, litecoin does not (beyond bitcoin).  All the same, I've been mining CPU LTC when my computers are on :-)

hang in there man and ignore that ad hominem garbage.  

Your advice is sound.  Although I remain a short, medium and long term bull, anyone who has done well with bitcoin would be foolish not to let a few coins go just for diversification, risk reduction and a small celebration!

On topic... I think its surprising how well the price has held up given bank holidays, bitcoin friday, and general holiday spending.  Its an advantage of a worldwide market, local variances get smoothed out.  We also saw this in a big way a few weeks ago when US and Europe "caught" the Chinese bubble pop.

I know these comparisons are tongue-in-cheek, but just for those who are confused as far as I can figure you couldn't buy a country for its GDP.  I mean, even if you COULD buy a country... you couldn't buy it for its GDP.   It wouldn't cost that little.  That would be like buying a company for its earnings.  But as we all know stocks trade for a PE multiple.  Makes sense because you are buying ALL future earnings output, not just one year.  So I think a PE of 10 would be ok esp. for these underperforming countries...

So Burma could go for 120million... that's way too... well... hmm...

I disagree.  This is a not a top-down organization but a peer-to-peer.  Everybody can switch when they want to, hopefully soon.  Its not very hard to see the m in front of the BTC.   Kudos to bitcoinity for being the first!

Its like a GHOST town in China right now!!! </sarcasm> 

My estimation is that this is the big one.  There may be a quick "return to normal" rise, but the Chinese companies dropping BTC acceptance is the interpretation of the Central bank ruling that we all didn't want.  It is going to be hard for BTC to take a significant amount of the international B2B trade if this major export country won't accept it.

Still, I haven't cracked my cold wallet so will be happy no matter what happens...

See you back at the L1 exponential line -- its still an AMAZING rate of growth!

Price abruptly flatlining (I'm talking about the stability around 1100-1200) is classic bubble behavior, scaled to where April is the "first sell off".  Now we are either in "back to normal" OR this time it REALLY is different!  And it could be you know because Bitcoin and the global economic and political environment in which it finds itself really is different.  

The gradually increasing Google trends is bullish http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q.  But there are other bearish forces which I'm sure you all know.

I'm seeing busting through $1300 as the trigger for a resumption in the mania.  This value will almost simultaneously crack the ATH, gold, and the recent BofA guidance.

I think that the BofA number is important, even though this number was created by pulling numbers out of BofA analyst asses and then adding them together.   But any veneer of math adds legitimacy in the minds of the collective investing public.  If Bitcoin breaks this guidance quickly, it embarrasses the traditional analysts and says that Bitcoin defies them.  And there is reason to think their analysis is flawed.  It is unknown if you can use prior historical charts of centrally managed growth (a company) with decentralized growth.  And if the rise takes longer than a week+, the "top" of the bubble starts to look too long for the rise as compared to classic flat-top bubbles.  In that case, this could be just the "1/3 to half-way there" hiccup that is often seen on bubble graphs.  

In general, you want to be IN an exponentially increasing commodity, and out for very short periods.  But if there was ANY time to take some profits (or sell now to buy back much lower), I think now is probably that time.  But having said that let me make it clear that I am < 10% fiat so some might say I am not following my own prescription.  BTW, this is not investment advice, I am not your investment advisor, do your own thinking.

Absolutely, paypal will essentially become the internet's escrow agent (but they won't call it that because that word is scary to most).  CC's protect the consumer at the merchant's expense, BTC protects the merchant at the consumer's expense.  In both cases escrow and some kind of trust or rating system is needed.

The answer is the last few years of it WORKING.  It is visible in the 10x increase in spending reported by bitpay as compared to last year.  In the increasing adoption by people in countries all over the world.  

I don't know what specific objections you are referring to.  But I constantly hear lots of economic objections that the objectors think are axiomatic but are in fact simply derivations of how the current fiat debt-based system works.  A good example is the idea that money must be backed by something or have marginal utility or intrinsic value.  When you really think about it, marginal utility is simply a neat solution to the "bootstrapping" problem.  It is irrelevant to the price today.  Nobody buys gold at $1200 because it has an intrinsic value of $100.  There can be other mechanisms to bootstrap a currency as we have seen with Bitcoin.  In particular, it was given a price in 2010 based on expectations of future utility/value.

And it is not the first zero-intrinsic-value currency.  There are other currencies that exist that have no marginal utility, like Rei Stones.  I would imagine that these stones are not valued on expectation of future utility, but based on the effort it took to make one.  They say, I am so powerful I can waste my money on this...

PS: This is not to say we won't go down a lot.  We are very high right now...  a bubble pop will not kill bitcoin.  In fact, it will let a lot more people enter the market.

I think he exited into CNY early... at about 4.100 per mBtC.  But that still equates to awesome returns at the current price of 2.500.

In other news, USA East coast woke up and said "We'll take those coins!!!"

Now, I'll just toot my horn a little...

  Who says I didn't?  Of course I'm trading it.  Otherwise why would I be wasting my time here...

WRT the China speculators finishing the unwinding of their positions, I like how volume in BTCChina is now significantly lower than gox and stamp.  Of course the imposition of a trading fee also has a lot to do with it.

 ▼ CNY    BTC China btcnCNY    2732.45 0 min ago       5387.09 -2654.64 -49.28%    2,297,610.62 12,377,445,390.52 CNY    2011 2011 (24h)    7588.88 3949 (24h)    2732    2733    2825.99 -93.54 -3.31%    79,523.17 224,731,849.70 CNY
▲ USD    Mt. Gox mtgoxUSD    588 0 min ago       833.65 -245.65 -29.47%    1,237,078.69 1,031,291,433.76 USD    453.29 455 (24h)    1242 750.3614 (24h)    591.005    596.97498    570.27 17.73 3.11%    93,803.33 53,493,621.87 USD
▲ USD    BitStamp bitstampUSD    545.5 7 min ago       777.52 -232.02 -29.84%    1,109,592.04 862,725,006.62 USD    378 382.21 (24h)    1163 718 (24h)    556.01    559.66    534.21 11.29 2.11%    116,399.55 62,182,381.82 USD

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

In terms of the timing, we were clearly several slopes above the baseline exponential.  The market tapping out twice around 1100 was a key indicator.  And there were multiple anecdotal indicators -- holiday spending, news coverage reaching saturation, etc.  Understanding the China role in this rally and understanding the perception of China's role.

Any significant negative news was going to trigger a correction.  Nothing has really changed in bitcoin-land.  We just got ahead of ourselves (again!)

But look, don't ever expect to "call" the top or bottom.  Be selling single digit percentages of your holdings every few days when super-exponential and the prior bubble looks like an anthill on the chart.  Be buying the same small chunks on the way down, starting from a 25 to 50% retracement.

This is not investment advice.  I am not your investment advisor.

people are asking for both BTC AND USD at very high interest rates on bitfinex right now.  The consensus seems to be we are going to go SOMEWHERE fast, but opinion differs on where! 

because it could pop up less than it fell.  Same reason (but inverse) ppl don't wait for the weekend to buy.

The near ATH bids on Gox, and significant USD leverage on bitfinex is making me think that the rest of the world is seeing the China news as a buying opportunity not a calamity.  And this is not untrue; China was not a significant player until a few months ago and so this news should not affect the long term situation.  Even more interesting its now CLEARLY legal to hold BTC if you are Chinese.  Granted, it may take an international trip (not far, to Hong Kong for example) to get some.  But if what we are hearing about the lack of savings opportunities in China, this might actually make a lot of sense for those people who would be buying significant BTC quantities anyway.

In other words, the announcement may have simply converted the country to a bunch of very long term holders.


tl;dr; So I'm now seriously considering that this pop might reverse itself very quickly... and adjusting my portfolio with that in mind.

OMFG, salt + lambo... might as well just burn a da vinci 

whats this huobi 5k rumor?  link?

ty!  and yes I did google for it b4 posting.  looks like btc is FAR from dead in china.  makes sense given what we've heard about their other store of value options.  even if its not money in china if its money elsewhere investing still makes a lot of sense

You could consider Life a one way death trip.  But AFAIK you are correct the radiation exposure may speed things up a bit.  I thought it was manageable though by hiding underground/ in a special compartment in the spaceship during peak times.

theres always the awesome beaches of ubatuba just a few hrs away and some interesting mtns btw them if you hike... too bad you didnt post this 2 weeks ago I really would have appreciated exchanging some btc for brl...

What happened guys?    You are all supposed to panic and sell like sheep!    But the price is just down a bit and holding.  Could it be that members of this forum are growing up (as investors). 

PS:  If the runup to 1000 was a bubble, this has got to be the weirdest, longest "return to normal" ever...

no as I read it you can sell or buy btc from them.  you cant be part of their fund.

No no... running would not be suitable.  It wouldn't be Bitcoin unless ALL the Gox employees (and one or two "friends" of Gox whose role is totally nebulous) institutionally forgot about private email and started accusing each other of everything under the sun and talking to lawyers right on this very forum in front of the Bitcoin public.

now THAT's bitcoin!

Let me observe to all the newbies and bears that the most likely reason to fund this dust and malleability attack to to buy cheap coins... 

yeah say btc withdraw reenabled.  it is the only way out.  all gox sellers now become buyers with little btc liquidity on exchange.  price rockets past stamp.

with no way in or out gox should have have halted trading.  they could have opened on mon with a lot less damage than this. this is one point that indicates they are underwater and arbing to make it back.  

I considered this but think that the price would be closer to stamp if gox was buying and arbing

I hate to fuel rumors, but this is the speculation forum.  

Pure speculation, but in a logical world, the ONLY buyer would be someone whose reputation could dramatically overwhelm that of Gox.  this organization would suddenly benefit from hundreds of thousands (or whatever) of verified bitcoin accounts.  

An existing bitcoin player would seem undercapitalized.  It would have to be a financial services company.  But it all depends on how much Gox is under-capitalized.  Repairing a couple million dollar shortfall would be nothing to a large company -- in fact it could result in a massive profit if they've been buying Gox coins at the discount.

This would explain the activity on Gox and bitcoinbuilder -- it might be illegal and unethical for Gox to buy their own coins for 100 bucks, but I think that it would not be for agent X who (for example) buys 90% of the Gox coins trading at 5-20% of other exchanges, then turns around and buys the company for keep-me-out-of-jail prices.

Who decides that the coins are stolen?  Maybe if I don't like you (or we are competing bidder to acquire a company) I just claim stolen block your coins and later say "oops terrible mistake".

Or I spend my coins and get the product.  Next I claim the coins are stolen.  Get new coins & keep the product.

Suddenly all the coins in your account are unspendable.  You bought them from a reputable exchange so WTF?  Well, someone just noticed that they were stolen from their wallet a week ago.  They've gone through about 50 people between then and now but you are the bag holder.


Its just unworkable.  Best to identify the thief and possibly throw him/her in jail, and extract not the exact coins but equivalent value from the thief through normal means.

For some reason... maybe its all the ATM announcements on reddit...maybe its GoWest's capitulation email...
but I've got this feeling all my BTC "swaps currently provided" on bitfinex are going to be cleared out 24 hrs from now...

by knowing the shorts you gain info assymetry advantage that can be used to accumulate coins at a lower price or otherwise make money.  but you need to be able to put this knowledge 2 use by triggering a short squeeze.   to trigger you need a thin ask book near the money so you can push the price up to squeeze levels all by yourself.  If too many people short pushing price down but ask orders do not follow then the shape of the ask is ripe for a squeeze.   check my post history; yesterday I called the squeeze that happened today...

also why would somebody (lender) expose themselves to bitfinex counterparty risk for .05%?  thats .0005.  Only to buy the same coins twice... forcing the shorts to buy to cover at a much higher price.  that is, buy coins delpeting the ask, give em to shorters to bulk up the ask and then buy them again.

WRT the copycoin issue, I would think this as well if this was all theoretical.  But there are other real-life examples.  For some reason gold is more monetized than silver, platinum, indium, etc even though these other elements (generally) have more utility so give more protection against a demonetization event.  And don't say the reason is because gold is more scarce -- because so it bitcoin.  The same it true with fiat currencies.  They all provide essentially the same functional properties but for some reason the USD is more valued than Zimbabwe whatevers.  Again, you can't use "scarcity" because bitcoin has that.  You can't use that the USD is more trusted than Zimbabwe because why is that trust important?  The USG is trusted not to cause hyper-inflation of the USD so this trust issue is a proxy for scarcity.  But you say, the USD is accepted by everyone in the US and in many places worldwide.  EXACTLY.  The "first mover's advantage" is really another way of saying Bitcoin will be accepted in more places than any alts.  Think about it... if you are going to go thru all the trouble to accept an alt you'll certainly also accept bitcoin.  But the reverse is not true.  Almost nobody accepts alts right now...

I was taught to double space after periods... probably quite common

bull up bear down universal investing terminology

Clearly bull trap "recoveries" are fueled by the idea that the prior dip may have been THE bottom and by the historical observation that no matter how well you did selling BTC or shorting it, you are not going to do do better than buy and hold unless you also catch the bull market.

So its important to buy near the bottom.  Personally, I have been thinking that that is now for the last few weeks  .  What will indicate the turn for you?

margin shorts and longs both being closed out on bitfinex but shorts are the lowest in months at 6.5k btc.  Longs still on the high side at 14million.

As a spectator, I'd say that this bet has more meaning with a longer term and wider spread.  Narrow and short is just making a joint statement about the size of your respective d*cks :-)  -- essentially saying I am rich enough and bored enough to gamble this on a coin toss.  If it means so little to you, why don't you invest it in something that could enhance BTC valuation? 

But longer and wider is making a statement about whether bitcoin is or isn't going to bubble up again...

In other words, windjc if you are a bull-in-a-bear-suit what's the point of this bet?  Just to prove you are a good at market timing (who cares) or just to get the adrenaline high you've been missing since Dec (chill, man)?

Awesome then have fun!!! 

The rpietila rule:  Whenever you read the word "never" its guaranteed to happen within a few days if not hours.  

Calm down.  They never said they had 385k -- that's his total gross.  That's ~$200 million in todays valuation.  If they had found that many, this arrest would be front page news.  He probably spent most of the coins or has them hidden away.  Since no specific numbers of impounded assets were mentioned, its possible that all they have (and sold) is his portion of the SR coins.  They can't sell those coins until they get a conviction, right?  Its not their coins until the conviction.  This guy pleading guilty freed up his SR coins...

I suppose libertarians might tolerate monopolies by competence not monopolies by fiat or force.  Monopoly is a very tricky subject...

just to draw a line in the sand... I think its time to go long. (do your own homework this is not investment advice I am not your advisor, etc)

I'm saying so because I make explicit suggestions every few months.  My last suggestion on this forum was to sell at around 800.

But I think you are asking "why do I think so?"  You can feel the tide turning when you immerse yourself in the datastream.  At the largest granularity, when negative news has no effect, positive news will begin to have a positive effect.  China FUD is exhausted.  Free nations will carry the torch from here, while the Chinese hide the cig in their mouth.

Lots of great stuff happening, too much to recite.  Don't get me wrong, I think the rise may be slow.  It may poke around here a bit; this suggestion is for medium to long term traders.  But it may rebound and THEN be slow.  I think the risk of being out during a pop is becoming greater than the profit for catching another small pullback.  But we may need a small fiat emergency to light the next fuse.  On the other hand nations seem to "schedule" these about once every 18 months so something is coming due...

You're right, more accurately I meant the market is exhausted of Chinese central bank announcements.  Those who fear this have probably already sold.

Your semi-autonomous personal information devices each hold some of your coins and use them for stuff like micro-payments to news sites, the purchase of music.  Your fridge automatically reorders the foods you've eaten each month.

Bitfinex shorts are actually pretty high right now at 9.5k BTC... so on average ppl are taking not covering.  Longs are moderately high at 16.8M USD.

keep an eye on that 450 BTC swap demand on bitfinex.   At .006% there's only one reason to fill it...

Here's a simple way to think about it.  The existence of a bitpay outlet probably won't increase/decrease the fundamental consumption of the stuff being bought medium and long term.  So people would (on average) sell the BTC on an exchange and buy the same products anyway.  

But every time they use BTC directly, the overall economic system directly gains the difference between the cost to use BTC and the cost to use paypal/credit card potentially with regional currency conversions (so around 2.5% to 5+%).  And both the customers and merchants have indirect savings in time and efficiency by not having to battle credit card fraud.  Consumer time savings when doing international transfers or WU is also huge.

Ignoring all the hype, adoption etc, its this fundamental advantage that will drive Bitcoin adoption long term.  

AnonMint's silly argument wins the battle but loses the war.

Its hilarious that our resident bear has a thumbnail showing a rocketship passing the moon!

Careful bears, its coming... eat those coins quick

Judging by my sampling there was a large turnover even if the total did not change much.

Yeah, IMO you aggressive bulls are jumping the gun here.  We popped a bit which caused wavering fence sitters to freak out and buy.  We'll consolidate here for a bit, and hopefully trickle up for a month... this price action will start convincing the larger players and the media that the next run is coming.  But I don't think its bubble time, instead compare it to the rebound from 2 to 4+ (in early 2012).

It really is too bad Jorge that you will not take a more active role in Bitcoins and that you discourage your fellow Brazillians from doing so.  Bitcoin would be very useful in Brazil for visitors and Campinas is the perfect spot to start it due to its tech infrastructure.  

I have traveled to Campinas several times over the last 2 years consulting with CPqD and co-located spinoffs and I'll report that I spent a significant amount of my free time acquiring, managing and worrying about money.  The problem is I could find only one ATM that would dispense cash (HSBC) although most of them theoretically were compatible with my card.  And wandering around a foreign country punching your PIN into every available machine has got to be a pretty dumb idea...  

To make things worse,  the one HSBC ATM that worked would only dispense about $100 USD per 24 hours.  Now, Brazil is not cheap.  The hotel is > $100 per night so using cash only is impossible.  But even using it for daily expenses was hard.  The cab ride to and from CPqD was about 20 bucks each way, leaving 60 bucks for food spread over 3 meals.  So $20 a meal is certainly doable, but not at a nice restaurant with beer, or allowing me to pay for others.  Also, I wanted to visit the ocean (6 hour drive) -- luckily I found a HSBC in Ubatuba, or I'd still be there :-).  And at the end of the trip I needed $150 for the cab ride BACK to the airport so I had to actually build that amount up via withdrawals over several days by eating dinner at the hotel.

Credit card fraud (double swipes, etc) is pretty high so I was told not to use my CC at every random store.  Also, Brazil has a couple of CC networks and the only one that worked for me was "Cielo".  But the "Cielo" reader was this handheld "mobile" device that sometimes would fail due to network connection or something... I had to pay one night hotel in cash.  Its nerve-wracking to be in a foreign country unable to speak Portuguese and wondering if your CC will work for gas already pumped or a meal already eaten.  Cash is king in these situations.

If there was a local Bitcoin exchanger it would have been easy.  I could have carried BTC in and exchanged it for a couple days of spending money.

Its sad to see all this effort go to waste.  Ripple, NXT, ethereum.  If you premine > 1% (and those should be unspendable for 5 years; think stock option vesting) or you close source then no matter how good your ideas are I don't give a sh*t.  We don't need another proprietary payment network.  Go sell your stuff to Visa or MC.  

PS: You probably would have done just fine by being an early miner of your own coin...

The problem is that he either willfully ignores the poster's specific content or unconsciously allows his bias to view certain posts as a launching pad for his FUD.  

In this case the prior poster did NOT say that  CC fraud as a % of total CC payments is > BTC fraud as a % of total BTC transactions, which is what Jorge refuted.  He simply said that the total CC fraud amount (11 billion using Jorge's #s) is > BTC ecosystem, which by Jorge's own estimate is 400 million.  So they are in fact in violent agreement :-).

Good thing we slowed down.  Turning on the afterburners too soon will flare out early

Breaking news!  Mathecat desperately trying to justify his bad decisions! Read all about it in wall observer.


PS: bye bye mat the train has left the station

Clearly they think BTC will not appreciate more than .5% per day.  However I think that the risk profile of money on an exchange is higher than BTC in a wallet and I do not think that these people are taking this into account.

IANAL but contract may not even be valid.  It could be argued that Goat didn't receive any consideration because the pirate pass thru was worth 0 at that pt.

chip chip death by 1040 cuts?

RE: pure incorruptible mathematics...

What's really interesting about this is that all the theorizing about the strength of the algorithms may not matter in practice.  It is very likely that the blockchain as a record, as a memory of financial transactions, has grown to be socially more important than the strength of its mathematics.

The stake-holders moved quickly to preserve the blockchain during the fork event last year.  I think that in the event of a crack to 1 or 2 the same thing would happen to whatever extent is necessary.  Including halting or rewinding what is de-facto recognized as the Bitcoin blockchain until a new algorithm or even a centralized kludge is devised.  Of course as a distributed project the blockchain as we know it today could continue.  However if that one isn't what the exchanges, merchants, and payment processors are using then it is not the "Bitcoin" blockchain.


 

quote author=ihaveaquestion link=topic=178336.msg7223710#msg7223710 date=1402363155]
It is not useless at all. Everybody has his learning curve and some will need more time than others to understand the same thing, which is particularly true in maths. But you insinuated the idea of the relevance of Bitcoin, which might flourish on the future. Maybe they will need less volatility and more killer apps though.
[/quote]

Yes, and this is well proven by marketing.  There's a whole class of ads that just try to get a company name "out there" without explicitly selling product.  Like the GE add running during the olympics that was showing jumbo jet engines, wind turbines, MRI's etc... How many olympics viewers are in the market for these products?

Same with Bitcoin.  People need to hear the word over and over... then someday they'll suddenly bite.

You are right the key trick here is to identify hash that is under a single entities' control.  To do so in a decentralized manner, we must create an incentive to mine coins to the same output address (once a single entities' coins go to the same output address, its easy to make an algorithm penalize an output address that is getting lots of coins by reducing the mining reward or increasing difficulty for only that address).  

One way to do this would be to only allow coinbase transactions to spend to addresses with a long prefix (essentially a "vanity" address).  For example, all coinbase addresses must begin with "1coinbaseTxn".  So if you want to "look" like multiple entities, you must be continually devoting lots of processing power towards generating new coinbase capable addresses.

There are lots of problems with this idea.  For example, it encourages centralization because it could take a long time for a small miner to generate a coinbase capable address.

Do USA merchants understand the value of Bitcoin?  AFAIK they ALL seem to only accept Bitcoins from US residents.  Overstock and now Expedia...

I don't get it.  What's forcing this behavior?  Obviously, the savings due to no fiat currency conversion provides a much bigger incentive to use BTC for international buyers than the incentive for US residents.

Who are the biggest merchants that accept international orders in BTC?

No you cant vfy that miner checked particular nonces time and net bw efficiently.  But u can vfy miners hash rate.  Dunno how it actually works but one soln is to have miners submit solutions found of lower difficulty. Ave number of solns found or best soln within a time period can give you average hash rate of 5hat miner.

I agree its hard to call something a bubble that settles 5 to 10 times higher than it started making it the years best investment.  So I spent the first year saying "bubble" in quotes or using terms like run-up but now I've just given up.  We are redefining the term bubble I guess.  Its a new phenomenon -- social networks have allows financial communication within large sub-cultures to happen faster then an exponential adoption curve, yielding super-exponential "bubbles" on top of a baseline exponential.  Someday some loser will write a book about it and get the Nobel prize in Economics...before Satoshi  .

The problem may be that a group of optimists want the price to go down until the auction...  but regardless, clearly there could be quite a bit of short term volatility as traders attempt to front run any actual or imagined downwards "encouragement".  For example, the high USD demand on bitfinex -- just because you take the USD loan doesn't mean you have to buy coins with it. Since the primary way to get funds to bitfinex is via BTC, this demand could be people encouraging others to sell their coins and put the USD up for loan.

I'd guess most bitfinex money comes in via BTC.  So borrow the USD but don't buy coin.  Puts temporary downward pressure on the price as people sell BTC to loan USD to you.   Its AS IF a manipulator sold coin but only costs 1-2% of the value of the coin, and you don't have to go short when you are bullish on bitcoin and about to bit on a block of 3000.  I'm not saying that somebody has been doing this for a month+... more likely just in the last week or two.  They are eating up all the leverage that gets unwound plus a little more.

I would not be surprised if this leverage unwinds a bit after the auction.  Although if I'm right, releasing the USD back to the owners might encourage them to buy a bit (if only to get out of BFX or b/c the price is low), sparking a rally that would encourage actual leverage.

Let's think hard here.  I mean REALLY stretch our brains.  The Winklevoss have spent LOTS of time and money creating an ETF.  Why did they do ths?  Because if this ETF is anything like GLD, it could dramatically increase the price of BTC over a few years.  So the Winklevoss could:
  1. Sell their coins to ETF purchasers, which will leave the BTC exchange rate more or less unchanged and result in the Winklevoss owning no coins.  At that point the BTC exchange rate will start rising but the Winklevoss will not benefit b/c they own no coins.
  2. Keep their coins, forcing ETF purchases to eventually hit the open market pushing up the BTC exchange rate and making their stash much more valuable.

Hmm... which will it be? 

The amount of longs really is quite large on BitFinex at 30.5 million now.  At these levels it seems like someone could create a flash crash with a small push that would feed upon itself as margins get called.  It has happened before on BitFinex.

Total Speculation: So how could this amount of leverage happen?  Let's say a whale was ready to move in with 20-50 million... clearly this would bring us to a new price level.  Would it be illegal manipulation for that whale to first leverage long, knowing he will soon buy it up to a higher price?  Or how about tempting leverage harvesters to attempt to flash crash, but also keeping a hidden bid of USD on BitFinex so he can sweep in and purchase the BTC at the flash-crash price.

Its a very clever perspective and in fact the most interesting thing I've read in this thread all week. 

tl;dr; He's essentially saying if you can't get a bank account to support your ATM then outsource the job to customers.

You do this via local supply and demand.  When the machine gets lots of fiat, raise the price of BTC at that machine.  When the price gets high enough, somebody will sell the machine BTC for fiat.  When the machine gets lots of BTC, lower the price. 

The ATM operator makes money by taking a small fraction of every trade, doesn't matter what the price sold/bought at is relative to the rest of the world (in the long term).  But of course when it diverges someone will show up with either BTC or cash to do the arbitrage... online posting the current price of BTC at your ATM encourages arbitragers to show up...

In my experience, this is normal behavior when there is not significant media attention.  Price is generally drifting down due to mining inflation.  Small players (general public) are not adopting in sufficient numbers to offset the mining inflation because we are between media attention cycles.  But large and institutional players (professionals) have long memories so they are investing.  Their decisions to invest tend to cause concentrated buying because its not worth their time unless they put in many millions.  

Why do you do this?    You are smarter than this, it really gets tiresome.  

Clearly the hash rate is thousands or even millions of times higher than necessary.  Its quite possible that the inflation tax (block subsidy) is actually encouraging mining farms, i.e centralization and therefore to some degree undermining confidence in the currency right now.  But it is needed to distribute currency.

At this point if the block subsidy was zero and txn fees negligible, large holders and bitcoin companies would be mining to support their other business efforts.  Just like how many companies contribute to Linux.

Yeah, even sooner would have been better.  If willybot hadn't been buying it might have slowed the bubble down enough so China would not have seen a need for such strong regulatory announcements (for example).

yes I have bought stuff... but only wholesale :-).  IDK what they are trying to become but I thought they started as ebay for b2b from China to the rest of the world...

For all the bears who think that 2013 was an unrecoverable bubble, please identify another bubble where 9 months after the pop the underlying fundamentals are better than it was during the bubble.

Our situation is simply that a lot of miners and short/medium-term speculative investment have coins that need to be moved to strong hands.  There is simply a reservoir of coins (which is increasing by 3600 per day) that need to be moved before we can make significant moves upwards.  Bitcoin is so useful that someday this reservoir is gonna run dry.

Saving money may be bad for the economy if everyone does it, but I think that is an open question long term.  After all if you need something you'd buy it so what saving does is increase efficiency -- you don't waste money on unnecessary stuff (short term, yea, people who work in luxury industries have hardship).  

But regardless of the effect on the larger economy, it is a very good thing for the saver.  So please recognize the bias in your term "hoarding" and how you are inculcated to imagine that saving is somehow "bad" to save the economy at your own expense.

Saving BTC can only be good for BTC in the long run.  Utility gives BTC its marginal value (very small), but saving (scarcity) is what gives BTC significant value.  And there is a positive feedback between savers and merchant adoption.  Merchants start taking BTC because they see more people holding it, more people holding it cause more merchants to accept it.

There's no collusion here.  I'm not "advocating" any kind of "hold the line" fairytale.  People ARE saving coins as part of a diversified savings plan which includes real estate, stocks, etc, due to the unique abilities of BTC to carry value during economic uncertainty and the fact that its an uncorrelated asset.  

Miners and speculators ARE trying to get the best price possible so are holding back in the hopes the price will rise...

But to see this going on 9 months after the "bubble" pop, to see larger and larger merchants and payment processors adopting the coin speaks to BTC's ultimate utility.  

Why did Paypal choose to accept BTC for digital assets?  Because digital assets are not sent to a home address.  So its too easy to get away with fraud buying digital assets -- steal CC, buy Vorpal Sword +1000, give it to another character, sell it for cash.  Police can't knock on anyone's door looking for an 80" TV.  It got so bad that ebay stopped allowing sales of digital assets.  But Bitcoin is perfect for digital asset purchase...

k, that's all I've got for tonight, PM me if you want to keep arguing :-)

Obviously means in some abstract sense not physical extent.  But of course, his statement is meaningless without the additional details.  An example could be "I believe that Bitcoin is larger in the sense that it will transfer more value than the internet does today (without bitcoin),"  or "I believe the market caps of "bitcoin companies" will ultimately exceed that of "internet companies"".

For example, "Internet" companies have exceeded the market cap of "telecom companies", and most people would characterize the internet industry as "larger", yet the internet runs on telecom provided physical cables.
 
Anyway, you get the idea...

ditto that!  Can someone translate this finance speak into english?

The meeting will focus on issues related to clearing Non-Deliverable Forwards (NDFs) and the digital currency bitcoin. The meeting will consist of two panels. The first panel will discuss whether a clearing mandate   is appropriate for NDFs, with a particular focus on how such a mandate would impact foreign exchange contracts  . The second panel will discuss CFTC’s jurisdiction with respect to derivatives contracts that reference the digital currency bitcoin.

can we get excited about this wall?  Or do we have to naysay it like we do all the ask walls?

"It must be a seller trying to push the price up"

EDIT: I've got to say if I was one of the 12k shorts on BFX that wall would be giving me the fear :-)

I have suggested watching the hash rate to find the bottom.  Why?  Well, if miners start taking machines offline, it affects supply by reducing the coins mined to the normal 3600 daily or less.  But more importantly, it indicates the lowest price that miners must sell at to make a profit (of course every miner will have a slightly different level).  Any lower and miners must hold and hope for a price increase.  To sell would guarantee that they couldn't pay the monthly bills.  That behavior could dramatically affect supply.

It looks like we are at the point:

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate
https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty

No, hash rate changes every 2 weeks, but meanwhile mining capacity is being added or removed from the network.  So we got (IIRC) blocks every 7 minutes on average or (for example) about 4200 coins per day during the big mining rise.  Over the last 9 months the market has gotten used to these extra coins.  If we drop to steady hashing, 600 coins per day will have a cumulative effect.  Sure this is a LOT less then volume but remember the same coin is traded many times.  If the hash rate actually drops then for 2 weeks fewer than 3600 coins will be mined.

This is a theoretical calculation that does not take into account factors like rent, salaries, AC, and the variety of hashing hardware currently deployed.  Seeing the hash rate level off or even drop indicates the true level where a significant fraction of the least efficient hardware is being turned off.

I'm not going to calculate it either, but the effect was actually visible 2 weeks ago.  I held off posting to eliminate statistical artifacts.

bitcoin tip day raising awareness last week
Lawsky rumored to be leaving
second market probably bought +7000 over the last month and various ambiguities with how they report things obscured that until last week
Ukraine central bank clearly validating Bitcoin's tremendous value during times of economic turmoil.

I think there's an education and volatility problem.  Otherwise we'd be seeing BTC trading at a premium against the USD in places like Argentina and Venezuela.  But AFAIK, it basically trades on par against the local currency with the "blue rate" USD.

I agree.  Is this garbage what we want the newbies who just watched that CNN special to read when they hit bitcointalk and look at active threads?

I understand that there's a fine line between trolling and a completely valid bearish perspective.  So it is not right to moderate on-topic bearish posts.  But the trash I'm reading today is not the image we want to present to new bitcoiners.  Letting it stay here is a bad idea if you care about Bitcoin, even if you care but happen to be short today.

So I'm here posting on this thread to ask other bitcoiners to en-masse ask the moderators to start monitoring this thread until the off-topic trolling -- in fact all the off topic posting -- goes somewhere else. 

Please reply to this post if you agree!!!   Drown out the garbage posts with replies so the trolls see how little we appreciate their off-topic "contributions".

And also start clicking the "report to moderator" link on off-topic posts to this thread.

thanks,
theZerg

No.  We don't need to provide a cesspit under the name "bitcoin".  Let them post their views on women and whatever else on some other forum.

Please take the time to help them.  Broad adoption is the best way to success.

Worst case, Abra could get a money transmitter license and so shield all of their Tellers from having to do so.  All bank employees don't have individual money transmitter licenses...

Now you need to start thinking about what's going to happen when all you "Bitcoin is a long term bull but we are in a bear market" types start to reverse your positions...

Its the irony of Bitcoin; once you realize you need it, you can't get any because nobody wants what you have to trade (your hyper-fiat)

Are you spending coin and rebuying, or supporting BTC in some other way?  Or did you just figure on riding other people's wave to riches?  If the latter, you deserve your losses.

I'm guessing here but isn't BTC-e the last place you can buy mostly anonymously?

We need the chinese continue with the pump